Open Culture summarizes philosopher Alain de Bottom's thoughts about architecture and neighborhood building:

In the first episode of The Perfect Home, embedded above, philosophical journalist and broadcaster Alain de Botton contends that we don’t live in the modern world. Rather, we do live in the modern world in that we exist in it, but we don’t live in the modern world in that few of us choose to make our homes there. As de Botton sees it, the residents of the developed world have, despite keeping up with the latest cars, clothes, and gadgetry, chosen to hole up in shells of aesthetic nostalgia: our mock Tudors, our restored cottages, our Greek Revivals. Having written books and presented television shows on philosophical subjects — you may remember Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness — he even brings in Nietzsche to diagnose this architectural disorder as an abject denial of reality. According to old Friedrich, he who builds himself into a fake reality ultimately pays a much greater price than what enduring real reality would have cost. With that ominous bit of wisdom in mind, de Botton travels the world in search of buildings designed with modern sensibilities and modern technology that nevertheless make us happy without enabling self-delusion.

In
February, 2012, in a case called Edwards Aquifer Authority v. Day, the
Texas Supreme Court held that landowners hold property rights to the
groundwater beneath their land, and that a regulatory restriction on
groundwater use could constitute a taking of private property. The
decision provoked strong reactions, both positive and negative,
throughout the world of water law, for it signaled the possibility of
severe restrictions on governmental ability to regulate groundwater use.

This
Article considers the deeper issue that confronted the Texas Supreme
Court, and that has confronted other courts across the country: how
should the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and parallel clauses
of state constitutions, apply to groundwater use regulation? Initially,
this Article explains why this issue is exceedingly and increasingly
important. It then reviews all of the groundwater/takings decisions
from federal and state courts in the United States. Finally, the
Article considers the implications of foundational property theories for
the application of takings doctrine to groundwater use.

The
analysis supports two key conclusions. First, it undermines arguments
against treating water rights as “constitutional property” — that is,
property protected by federal and state takings clauses. Proponents of
those arguments generally assert that treating water rights as property
has uneven support from prior caselaw and that such treatment will be
prevent sensible governance. A review of groundwater caselaw
demonstrates that the former assertion runs counter to the weight of
authority, and that the fears underlying the latter argument are
overstated. Second, and more importantly, the analysis undermines
arguments for granting groundwater use rights heightened protection
against regulatory takings. Recently, litigants and commentators
skeptical of government regulatory authority have widely advanced those
arguments. But they find no support in past groundwater/takings
caselaw, and no property theory justifies adopting such an approach.

Rawabi represents something totally new -- a visionary
Palestinian-directed
private sector project, with support from both Israeli businesses
and a major Arab government. It has the potential to shift the
conversation on the
region's future on both sides of the Green Line. It could convince
Palestinians -- and the rest of the world -- that the future of the West
Bank shouldn't be
shackled to Ramallah or Jerusalem's vacillating willingness to hash
out fundamental issues. It could prove that there's an appetite, both
among Palestinian
consumers and foreign donors, for the creation of a social and
economic existence in the West Bank that's de-coupled, insomuch as
currently possible,
from the Middle East's tense and labyrinthine politics.

It
would also help solidify the benefits of the current cessation in
hostilities. Indeed, Palestinian
leader Mahmoud Abbas's progress in fostering the end of violent
resistance in the West Bank in the years after the bloody Second
Intifada, coupled with
Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad's widely-respected
institution-building initiative, could get a crucial private sector
assist through Rawabi's
eventual success.

We
began these two decades reacting to the market’s interest in developing
greenfields and coastal property and end it wondering how to prepare
more urbanized places for a growing population of smaller households who
seek the amenities of urban living and some protection from the storms
ahead. This essay discusses this and nine other fundamental paradigm
shifts in environmental and economic conditions that are reshaping the
law and changing the way state and local governments control land use
and order human settlements.

Over at the Faculty Lounge Al Brophy highlights a dramatic story out of Virginia about homeowners association that destroyed itself in a protracted lawsuit over a yard sign:

[The board of the homeowners association] passed a resolution allowing the board to fine residents up to $900
per infraction for violating HOA guidelines. Across the country, fining
authority has been controversial, with HOAs hitting residents with
levies for such transgressions as displays of colored Christmas lights
and patches of dead grass.

Board members believed that they had
the right under Virginia law, but the Farrans saw an illegal power grab
that had no basis in the HOA’s covenants. When the board, acting at a
meeting that was not publicly announced, rejected the Farrans’ roof and
deck projects for aesthetic and architectural reasons, the Farrans said
it was retribution.

“It’s like we weren’t living in America,” Maria Farran said. “You are
always one board election away from a tyranny. They wield enormous
power.” The Farrans filed a lawsuit against the HOA saying it
didn’t have the authority to impose fines and had vindictively rejected
their home improvements.

This
draft article analyzes and criticizes the New York court’s tort remedies
in its nuisance decision, Boomer v. Atlantic Cement, and Calabresi and
Melamed’s famous law-and-economics article, One View of the Cathedral.
From the Remedies branch of Legal Realism, this draft finds both wanting
because both subordinate the winning plaintiffs’ injunction remedy to
money damages.

Both the Boomer decision and the Cathedral article
undervalue public health and environmental protection. This mindset
militates against robust and effective private-law remedies for
defendants’ environmental torts.

In addition, the Cathedral
article’s four-rule organization and vocabulary are confusing and
misleading. In particular its Rule 1) over-emphasizes the effect of an
injunction, which, if the defendant breaches, will usually lead to
compensatory contempt and a money award that converts a so-called
“property right” into a so-called “liability right.”

Behavioral
economists’ studies and recent events have undermined and qualified many
of the market-economics theories in the Cathedral article. This draft
favors a flexible and pragmatic common-law technique instead of the
law-and-economics analysis that favors awarding a nuisance-trespass
plaintiff damages over an injunction. Moreover, the draft maintains that
the economists’ presumption of nuisance-trespass parties’
post-injunction negotiation leading to an excessive coerced money
settlement is overstated and should yield to more particularized and
contextual analysis.

This draft maintains that the Cathedral
article’s four point array of remedies solutions is both too long and
too short. Rule 3) is the liability decision that doesn't belong in a
remedies analysis at all. Rule 4)’s plaintiff-pays solution destabilizes
property rights and should be abandoned in private litigation. Rule
2)’s preference for damages over an injunction should be a rare remedy.
Analysis of the trespass and nuisance injunction should study structural
litigation’s injunctions and emphasize flexibility and equitable
discretion, in short a broadened Rule 1). Other remedies, punitive
damages and restitution, should also be considered as viable options.

Taking
earlier Legal Realists cue, this article seeks to replace theory with a
more functional approach. By arguing in this draft for more and more
detailed injunctions, the author hopes for augmented environmental
protection and private-law remedies against global warming and climate
change.

The N.Y. Times takes a look the city's First Look program, "in which a small number of banks have agreed that instead of selling troubled residential buildings to the highest bidder, they will give community developers first crack at taking the buildings over."

While the conditions in some of the buildings at issue sound truly awful, I do wonder if turning over the apartments to a non-profit is a viable long-term solution. The article suggests that community groups don't really have enough cash to pull off these large scale purchases. And, everyone seems to be ignoring that the real reason that these buildings have fallen into disrepair is New York City's rent control legislation.

Thousands
of religious monuments have been donated to cities and towns. Under
Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, local, state, and federal governments now
have greater freedom to accept religious monuments, symbols, and
objects donated to them for permanent display in public spaces without
violating the Free Speech Clause. Now that governments may embrace
religious monuments and symbols as their own speech, the obvious
question arises whether governments violate the Establishment Clause by
permanently displaying a religiously significant object.

Fearing
an Establishment Clause violation, some governmental bodies have
privatized religious objects and the land beneath them by selling or
transferring the objects and land to private parties. Some transactions
have included restrictive covenants that require the buyer to maintain
the religious object or reversionary clauses that allow the government
to reclaim the land. Others have sold or transferred the religious
object without soliciting bids from other buyers.

This article
provides an in-depth analysis of five cases in which governmental bodies
resorted to privatizing public land to avoid violating the
Establishment Clause. Drawing from Establishment Clause jurisprudence
involving religious displays, this article utilizes the Lemon and
Endorsement tests as analytical tools for resolving the
constitutionality of land dispositions involving religious displays.

This
article considers the purported secular government purposes for selling
or transferring land to private parties. The government has sought to
justify these land dispositions as a means to provide memorials that
honor veterans or promote civic-mindedness, to preserve the religious
object in order to avoid showing disrespect to religion, and to avoid
violating the Establishment Clause. I argue that these purported
government purposes are secondary to a religious interest because there
are other alternatives to achieve the government’s purposes.

I
also examine the effects of these land dispositions on the reasonable
observer. The Herculean efforts exerted by the government to save the
religious monument send a message of government endorsement of religion.
Restrictive covenants that require the private owner to maintain the
religious monument and reversionary clauses that allow the government to
reclaim the monument and underlying land perpetuate state action and
excessively entangle the government.

I conclude that the best
measure to avoid the Establishment Clause is to simply remove the
religious object. Removing the religious object will protect the
dilution of sacred religious symbols through their secularization and
will provide greater inclusiveness in public spaces for religious
minorities and nonbelievers.

Jonathan Zasloff of UCLA asks why there's very little case law on form-based land use codes:

One can understand that in several ways, I suppose. You could infer
that New Urbanism just leaves less room for legal disputes than
traditional Euclidean zoning. For example, there is no need to worry
about non-conforming uses, use variances, or conditional use permits
with Form-Based Codes because those codes do not regulate uses
to begin with. Certainly many advocates of New Urbanism might make this
argument; they would argue that New Urbanist codes, based upon building
form and the transect, are more certain than traditional Euclidean
zoning and also more protective of private property precisely because
they leave more discretion in the market. They are right about the
general point, but it is hard to argue that any legal framework simply
eliminates legal disputes — if it did, it would either be the first such
system to do so or rely upon a sort of coercion wholly at odds with New
Urbanism. (Not too many land use disputes under Stalinist land use,
but that surely did not reflect an advantage of the system).

Alternatively, you could argue, as many critics of New Urbanism do,
that its land use philosophy is essentially a boutique product, suitable
for Berkeley, Boulder, or Austin, but not for “real” American places.
Thus, it is not prevalent enough to generate cases. This argument runs
aground on facts. New Urbanism does not work everywhere, but it is hard
not be impressed by the wide variety of American communities that are adopting it.

In
anticipation of the inevitable shift from adaptation planning to
adaptation action, this chapter provides a background on climate change
adaptation policy and a survey of climate impacts and adaptation
responses likely to put some demand on legal institutions and rules. The
chapter opens by defining the key terms and concepts of climate change
adaptation as it has been discussed in major policy analyses. The
chapter then summarizes the scope and focus of federal, state, local,
tribal, and private climate change adaptation planning initiatives. From
there, the chapter reviews the current law of climate change
adaptation, which as mentioned above is not yet extensive. What few
morsels of legal initiative exist break down into five types: (1)
coastal land use controls; (2) environmental impact assessment programs;
(3) corporate disclosure requirements; (4) endangered species
protection; and (5) anti-adaptation measures The chapter closes with a
survey of the potential legal issues climate change adaptation could
spark, organized into five categories: (1) land and resources; (2)
infrastructure; (3) business disputes and regulation; (4) health and
safety concerns; and (5) governance and process.